Tag: Denis Kang

Props: Supersindo.kr. Picture of Kang in action available after the jump.

I don’t know how to break this to you, so I’ll just be blunt about it: Remember when a victory over Denis Kang actually meant something? Yeah, those days have traveled the same road as Pepsi Jazz. After a disappointing 1-2 run in the UFC, “The Super Korean” has gone 2-3-1, which includes his current three fight losing streak.

And now, the once dominant PRIDE middleweight is competing on this season of Korea’s Dancing with the Stars.

If you’re wondering how the Korean DWtS differs from the American version (you aren’t, but play along), Director Shin Myeong-hoon recently told The Korea Heraldthat their version “will focus more on dancesport (competitive ballroom dancing), which has its own fan base.”

Granted, I’m not exactly a dance critic. In fact, I didn’t even know competitive ballroom dancing was a thing until that last sentence. But from the looks of this picture from last night’s episode, Denis Kang is about to suffer a loss far less dignified than his recent loss to Jesse Taylor:

Following his release from the UFC, Denis Kang has kept a somewhat lower profile, competing for promotions like W-1 in Canada and Impact FC in Australia. But a return to the big leagues is even less likely now that he’s dropped two straight. In May, Kang suffered a first-round submission loss at the hands of Jesse Taylor — not a good look for a formerly top-ranked fighter who once went 23 consecutive fights without a loss — and last Sunday he was flattened by local talent Seung Bae Whi in a slugfest at Road FC 3 in Seoul, South Korea.

Here’s the video of round 2 of that fight. Things really start to heat up around the 2:30 mark, and Kang is face-down taking knees to the head on the mat by the 3:00 mark. Good to know that at least in South Korea, PRIDE neva die. Are we seeing the end of the line for the Super Korean?

I’m not usually one to understate the obvious, but damn, Denis Kang has had a bizarre run since being released by the UFC in 2009. Aside from picking up a first round arm-triangle victory over Dae Won Kim, Kang has fought Paulo Filho to a very questionable draw at Impact FC, which was quite the spectacle in its own right. Kang returned to action last night at Road Fighting Championship 2 (Road? Okay, the “word + FC” formula is just messing with us now…) in Seoul, South Korea against Eun Soo Lee.

The bout was a pretty odd concept from the get-go. Despite both fighters being natural middleweights, the fight was held at light heavyweight. Also, Eun Soo Lee, who I won’t even pretend you remember from his lone appearance in Pride, last fought at M-1 Challenge 8 back in 2008.

(Will the winner of this fight make it back to the UFC or will they go back to Australia where the promises of paydays are hollow.)

The fledgling Canadian Battlefield Fight League promotion announced today that a middleweight bout between former UFC veterans Denis Kang (33-12-2 2 NC) and Jesse Taylor (17-6) has been added to its April 7 BFL 7: Invasion event that will take place at the Frank Crane Arena in Nanaimo, BC.

Kang, who was dropped by the UFC after going 1-2 in the Octagon, has not been beaten since leaving the promotion. A member of American Top Team who also trains at Tristar with the likes of Georges St-Pierre when at home in Montreal, Kang defeated Korean Dae Won Kim in June under the W-1 banner in this past June and fought to a split draw with former WEC middleweight champion Paulo Filho in at Impact FC 2 in July.

Taylor has also done well since being released by the UFC. After losing to CB Dollaway at UFN 14 the Team Quest fighter has gone 11-3 and has logged wins over UFC vets Drew Fickett, Jason Day, Chris Camozzi and Murilo Bustamante. He fought eight times in 2009 and has fought five times thus far in 2010.

The winner of the bout should get a second look by the UFC, but Taylor, who was pulled from the TUF 7 final for kicking a window out of a limo in Vegas may not get the call up to fight for the Zuffa-owned promotion due to disparaging remarks he made about the double standard the promotion has when dealing with different fighters. At the time, UFC president Dana White had flown to Southern California to bail former light heavyweight champion Quinton "Rampage" Jackson out of jail following his arrest for dangerous driving and evading police.

After re-watching the Impact FC bout between Denis Kang and Paulo Filho that ended in a split draw – the second notable MMA bout to do so in a month with the other being the WEC 49 bout between Jamie Varner and Kamal Shalorus – I couldn’t help but wonder why MMA continues to rely on a scoring system created and tailored for boxing judging.

When the majority of mixed martial arts organizations adopted the Unified Rules in 2000, along with the governing principles, each organization adopted the system known as the 10-point must system.

Under the guidelines of the 10-point must system, judges score each frame based on their accumulative points tally for the round. The winner of each round receives a score between seven and 10 depending on who won the round. If a round is deemed a tie, both combatants are assessed 10 points each by the judge who perceived the frame to be even. The problem with the system is, when used to score a three-round MMA bout, the likelihood of a fight ending in a draw is exponentially higher than in a 10-round boxing match.

If you can imagine a fight card populated by has-beens and no-accounts, filmed by the blind and narrated by the guys from “Flight of the Conchords” (except without the genuinely funny parts), then you have a pretty good idea what it was like to watch Impact FC’s first-ever pay-per-view on Saturday night. “The Uprising” was filled with plenty of the awkward pauses, even more awkward announcing, terrible camera work and retro graphics that we’ve come to expect from fledgling MMA promotions. As for the actual fighting? It played out about like you might have predicted, too.

Indeed when, just a few moments into the broadcast, nattily attired but totally incompetent ring announcer James White forgot his lines midway through his introductory remarks and had to stop cold to confess he’d drawn a blank, you knew it was going to be a long night. Despite how many times we were informed by the play-by-play team that the action in the cage was “thunderous” or “amazing” the show – filmed around noon local time in Sydney, Australia in a partially filled arena — felt so flat that the fighters themselves would’ve been hard-pressed to break the monotony. Luckily for them, it didn’t seem like they were trying too hard.

When the upstart Impact Fighting Championships organization announced it would be putting on a series of events in Australia anchored by a cast of controversial WEC, PRIDE and UFC castaways like Karo Parisyan, Ricco Rodriguez, Paulo Filho, Ken Shamrock, Paul Daley and Jesse Taylor, Ben and I figuratively high-fived each other in anticipation of the sheer amount of material for the site the event would undoubtedly produce.??

The fact that the first show basically went off without a hitch would have lost us both money if we trusted our predictions enough to bet that there would be problems with the show.??

Realizing that chronically unreliable personal demon chaser Paulo Filho will do well to make it to one of his scheduled July Impact Fighting Championship bouts, the Australia Athletic Commission has disallowed the Brazilian from competing on both the July 10 and July 18 cards as planned.

Filho (20-1), who was originally also slated to fight at Impact FC’s scrapped July 3 event in Perth, takes on K-1 Heroes, PRIDE and UFC veteran Denis Kang (32-12-1, 2 NC) on July 18 in Sydney if he makes it to the show.

Embattled former WEC middleweight champion Paulo Filho sat down with TATAME’s Guilherme Cruz and the Brazilian says he’s fed up with the amount of disrespect he has been shown by MMA media and fans and that he deserves more reverence for what he has done in his 10-year career.

“I’d like a little more support, because the critics are so numerous that it’s discouragement. An athlete holding a professional record of 20 wins and only one loss can’t be disrespected.”

Mike Russell caught up with Warrior One (W-1) president Jack Bateman at the MMA Expo in Toronto last weekend to talk about his upcoming show on Saturday night and what the future holds for the burgeoning Ontario, Canada-based promotion. According to the promoter, his organization has some big plans for the rest of 2010 and beyond that includes signing the top free agents from around the world and developing the talent at home in the Great White North.

Besides their "Judgement Day" show set for this Saturday night in Laval, Quebec that features UFC and PRIDE veteran Denis Kang (32-12-1), Shooto veteran Antonio Carvalho (11-4), Zahabi MMA standout Thierry Quenneville (15-8) and the return of Ivan Menjivar (20-7), Bateman says that the promotion is planning two more events this year.